Let’s not get sidetracked, please.
OK, bottom line is it’s never gonna happen and IF it ever did it wouldn’t have anything to do with sports prowess.
Contract college tuition is still north of $35K. And if you’re OOS, it’s the full $52K. Leland Stanford’s farm is modeled entirely after Cornell, FWIW. Expansion has actually been proposed through the years. I believe Colgate once received an invitation. Any school that plays major DI sports – and collects major DI revenue – has no interest now.
A sports league notwithstanding, the eight ivy schools do collude on ivy day. So it is not purely a sports league.
Seriously? I had never heard of “ivy day” so I looked it up online. Wikipedia—not a definitive source, but a source–identifies 7 schools that practice the ivy day ritual of burying an ivy stone prior to commencement. Only 2 of the 7–Princeton and Penn—are Ivy League schools. The others are Bates, Bowdoin, Smith, Tulane, and the University of Nebraska. So it would appear ivy day is neither unique to the Ivy League nor universally practiced within it.
No, I think the Ivy League is just an intercollegiate athletic conference, and not a particularly good one. Its 8 member institutions do share a commitment to academic excellence—though they are certainly not alone in that regard. And 7 of the 8 are among the oldest in the U.S., though again, they share that title with William & Mary, Moravian, U Delaware, Rutgers, and others.
Honestly, I have no idea what it would mean to “join the Ivy League” apart from joining the athletic conference.
@bclintonk - I think Ivy Day relates to admissions announcements, and the “collusion” suggestion is the simultaneous release of the results.
@bclintonk Ugh!! Every school would be doing the same thing…Patriot, SEC, PAC 12, ACC. The difference is people on CC when speaking of the Ivy league use the term in regards to top academic schools not sports as you well know.
@moscott,
Of course, I’m familiar with use of the term Ivy League to refer to a particular group of 8 highly regarded academic institutions. The thing is, the only real common bond among them, and what distinguishes them from other fine academic institutions like Stanford, U Chicago, Johns Hopkins, etc. is that the 8 are joined together in an intercollegiate athletic conference. If “expanding the Ivy League” doesn’t refer to expanding the athletic conference, then it’s an utterly incoherent concept. What in the heck could it possibly mean if not that?
You’re both right. Although AFAIK, no Ivy League school uses the term “Ivy Day” in connection with admissions decisions. For this usage, I think the term was probably started on College Confidential or a similar site.
FYI, the common decision date only applies for RD; SCEA/ED decisions, while within a few days of each other, are not on the same date (or at least have not been for the last few cycles).
As an alum, I don’t think this is something that most of us would advocate. We went to an Ivy League school knowing the deal about athletics and for most of us its not that much of a priority. That is not to say we don’t enjoy the Yale Harvard Game, but I can say that I partied and tailgated my four years there and the 35 years since graduation and I have never once been to an actual game. Throwing a big tailgate for my graduating senior this year. The actual game is not a priority.
Not necessarily top in all areas. For instance, most of the Ivies’ engineering/CS departments pale in comparison to many public universities such as UIUC, UMich, GTech, etc.
And that’s before one brings up the apex of engineering/CS schools such as MIT, Caltech, CMU, Stanford, and Berkeley.
And in one humanities/social science field which I have had a strong interest in from undergrad onwards, the #1 and #3 departments in the country happen to be public universities(Berkeley and UCLA).
Godwin’s Law of College Confidential states that as the length of a CC thread on admissions increases, the probability of race being mentioned approaches one.
Murphy’s Law of College Confidential states that as the length of a CC thread discussing any Ivy League school increases, the probability of someone comparing that school unfavorably to the University of Chicago and/or Stanford approaches one. And here we are…
Not sure what’s being argued above. I don’t believe the Ivy League schools claim to be best at everything, or that many would dispute that there are places with bigger and deeper engineering programs. People who simply want the best engineering program would generally be better-served elsewhere. If they choose an Ivy League school, they probably have additional/other reasons for doing so.
The Ivy League is an athletic conference made up of relatively old, relatively excellent schools in the Northeast that prioritize academics over athletics, and the term “Ivy League” has certain social connotations based on the schools’ place in society and the people who attended/attend them.
Personally (and speaking as an Ivy Leaguer), I think the term isn’t very meaningful, in that Ivy League schools are more similar than dissimilar to many non-Ivies and there are big differences within the Ivy League. I believe, for example, that Harvard is more similar to Stanford than it is to Dartmouth.
The athletic conference isn’t expanding unless doing so would be good for both the schools currently in it and any that would join it. The “Ivy League” as a term isn’t expanding unless the athletic conference expands. If the term expands, it will become less meaningful, it seems to me.
To me this discussion of “expanding” the Ivy League bring it’s purpose of a sports league into focus. What they are is a group of schools that have D1 athletics but are not athletically focused schools. They are in New England (leagues used to be more regional when travel was more difficult) on the whole pretty old and have honed their reputation of academic excellence for 2-3 centuries (excepting Cornell). The B1G is a group of mosty large state flagship schools whose academic reputations have improved considerably over the past 50 years. The lone exception is Northwestern who is the oddball in this group. I could see creating a league with the likes of Northwestern, Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice, Stanford and some others that are private universities with a reputation for academics and robust athletics programs. The Ivy League is perfect just as it is.
@moscott I didn’t know there were leagues for academics. In my view the “Ivy League” is just an athletic league formed from some very old northeastern and academically focused and accomplished schools. They would be that regardless of their league affiliation.
I don’t think the academics and athletics need to line up in terms of quality. Successful athletic partnerships do not require schools with similar academics. And pairing with similar academic schools may not result in better partnerships from an athletics standpoint.
“A sports league notwithstanding, the eight ivy schools do collude on ivy day. So it is not purely a sports league.”
A big part of the Ivy League agreement is the system for monitoring the academic qualifications of the athletes recruited to the schools. So there’s a lot of collaboration and cooperation between the schools relating to admissions practices, because the schools have to administer the Academic Index system transparently among themselves. Other sports conferences typically don’t do that.
The Ivies used to collaborate a lot more outside of sports. For example, they all used to cooperate/collude in financial aid packages and also on tuition increases. Pretty much, all the Ivies used to offer identical aid packages to admitted students and had the same sticker price. USDOJ thought that was price fixing and those practices were broken up in 1991.
The Ivies now participate in a broader and looser group, COFHE, that is about 30 high end schools.
@DeepBlue86 I laughed.
So I guess you should add to your list: “Moore’s Law of College Confidential states that as the length of a CC thread discussing the rankings of elite schools increases, the probability of someone attempting to direct the focus to engineering approaches one.”
That’s good, @ThankYouforHelp - although I might add “Moore’s Second Law of College Confidential states that in any thread discussing the rankings of elite schools, the number of attempts to direct the focus to engineering will double every 18 posts”.
If you were going to expand the way college sports conferences expand, you’d have to take two teams or four teams. And you would try to expand into geographic areas that are adjacent to your current geographic footprint.
Given all the other factors discussed, that would suggest at most four somewhat plausible candidates in theory – Gtown, JHU, Army and Navy. You build out the portion of the Acela corridor below Philly but still stay within the northeast. And then you could easily sort (as all expanded sports conferences do) into two divisions – north and south.
But there’s no reason this would ever happen. Since there’s no money in Ivy sports, and money is the only reason conferences expand. And more members just dilutes the substantial off-field value of the Ivy brand. But fun to speculate about.
If they marketed it right with an effective enough hook, that could change. Maybe the Ivies should assign it as a case study project for their MBA students…
There’s money in Ivy sports, just not the gobs at some schools. Look at how college development works.